Kim Davis, the former county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses in Kentucky to same-sex couples, must pay a total of $260,104 in fees and expenses to attorneys who represented one couple, according to a federal judge’s ruling.
That is in addition to $100,000 in damages a jury said the former Rowan county clerk should pay the couple who sued.
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Davis drew international attention when she was briefly jailed in 2015 over her refusal despite the US supreme court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. She based her refusal on her belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
All she had to do was let someone else in her office issue the certificates. But like all religious bigots, she didn’t understand that
The first amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom protects citizens from the government. If you are a government employee, you are what the first amendment protects citizens from.
She was wrongfully enforcing her own religious beliefs on her assistants. Kentucky (at the time) required county clerks to sign all marriage certificates, or the clerk’s assistants could sign their name instead. Davis could literally have refused to sign every “gay” marriage cert that came in to the Rowan county office, but as long as someone in the office signed it there wouldn’t have been a problem. However, she forbade any of her assistants from signing the certs because she considered the mere act of stamping her name on one to be exactly the same as her personally endorsing “gay” marriage. So even if her assistants had no religious objections to “gay” marriage they were prevented from doing their jobs because of her religious beliefs.
So bigot gets what bigot deserves. The only tragedy to this story is that Matt Staver gets to fuck off with no consequences.